Today, digital systems are used to represent and process virtually all types of media in commercial, entertainment, educational and other fields. For example, visual media such as photographs, movies, video and animations are largely handled in the digital domain. Similarly, audio media such as speech, music, sound effects, etc., are also recorded, edited, produced, copied and transferred in the digital domain.
The production systems used to produce and manipulate digital media perform many other functions such as adding content and auxiliary information to the media, transferring portions of the media for review and approval, storing and indexing the media, etc. There are many possible operations on even a small media portion, such as on one of thousands of frames in a movie. These operations are often repeated many times by trial-and-error, and then extrapolated to larger segments of the production. There may be many hundreds or thousands of operations performed over weeks of creation. This is further compounded when many people are involved in creating, reviewing, or approving the production at steps along the way. Often, some of the people involved in the production are not technically inclined and, yet, must work in the highly technical and specialized environment provided by a sophisticated production system. To make the situation even more difficult, the production team members may be located in geographically remote places thus making communication and collaboration extremely difficult.
Thus, it is desirable to provide production system features to improve upon one or more shortcomings in the prior art.